This is somewhat off topic, but I found an interesting document
describing the largest thermonuclear bomb ever detonated:
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Russia/TsarBomba.html
It produced a 50 MT blast. It was 8 m long and weighed 27 tons. It
was dropped from a Tu-95 airplane.
It was detonated in 1961 for no particular reason. Khrushchev just
felt like showing the capitalists what the Soviets could pull off,
after a 2-year "de facto moratorium" on bomb testing. There is no
practical military use for a bomb of this size.
This is an interesting illustration of the power of fusion compared
to other sources of energy. Anyone can cause an explosion of this
size merely by setting off 50 million tons of TNT, but that takes up
much more space and it weighs 1.9 million times more. This
illustrates the energy density of fusion.
The bomb was originally intended to be 100 megaton but Sakharov
decided to reduce the yield, so it may be that a 27 ton object can
produce 4 million times more than a chemical device, or even more
than that. Although TNT does not have particularly good energy
density compared to gasoline or coal, so the comparison is somewhat skewed.
In the book I estimated that D2 can produce roughly 7.6 million times
more energy per gram than gasoline. Heavy water has a lower ratio
because it is mostly oxygen.
People have little notion of what these numbers mean. During the
recent discussion of cold fusion at the CBS "60 Minutes" website,
some people speculated about how much it would cost to install heavy
water pipes under streets and in buildings, to deliver fuel for the
central heater furnaces, for example. I pointed out that you could
deliver all of the fuel you need for a year with an eyedropper; you
don't need pipes. No distribution system is needed. All fuel will be
build into the machinery, the way battery acid is today.
- Jed
